Kong’s battle to position Kuma as the service mesh of choice received a $100 million funding boost that could come in handy as the Google-based Istio service mesh platform struggles to find its footing. 

Tiger Global Management led the funding round with participation from existing investors Index Ventures, CRV, GGV Capital and Andreessen Horowitz as well as new investor Goldman Sachs. Kong has now raised $171 million through four funding rounds, which tripled its valuation since its Series C to $1.4 billion.

The investment comes on the heels of a record year for the company, which saw a significant increase in adoption of Kong Gateway, its flagship open source software, exceed 250 million total downloads and 1.5 million monthly active instances.

Marco Palladino, CTO and one of Kong’s creators, said the company will use the funding to “accelerate R&D and accelerate the support that we are providing to our enterprise customers to grow in the market.” He claims that Kong, having been named a leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Lifecycle API Management, is better positioned to capture the future market opportunity of modern open source infrastructure software than any of its competitors in the Gartner quadrant.

“How many companies do you see in the Gartner quadrant that can provide more than just a gateway, but a holistic platform that goes from gateway to mesh, and have enterprise growth and acceleration to a point where they can influence the market? There’s not many other than Kong,” Palladino said. 

Kong threw its hat into the service mesh pool in 2019 when it launched Kuma, which the company calls “a universal service mesh.” This means Kuma is designed to work within and outside of the Kubernetes ecosystem. Palladino said this includes virtual machines (VMs), containers, legacy environments, and Kubernetes. 

Kuma includes a universal control plane that is based on the Envoy service proxy. It combines a data plane and advanced control plane to allow users to set permissions, expose metrics, and set routing rules using native custom resource definitions (CRDs) or a RESTful API. Most of the first-generation service mesh platforms lacked a mature control plane that required a lot of manual work or customization, Palladino said.

“I like to think of service mesh as an opportunity for us to stop doing hundreds of things that teams are doing every time they build a new application today,” he explained. 

Kuma taps into Kong’s self-named open source platform API gateway. That gateway manages the flow of information between an organization and various methods of deploying modern microservices. Kong also offers an enterprise version of the platform that includes more management control built on top of the open source consumer version.

Most recently, the company launched Kong Konnect, a managed, cloud-native connectivity gateway that links APIs to service meshes. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify and automate application deployment and management. GE, Nasdaq, and Samsung are among its customers.

“We abstract away connectivity the same way Kubernetes abstracts away the data center and becomes part of the underlying infrastructure,” Palladino said. In this sense, application teams are no longer builders but consumers of connectivity management. 

Palladino said the goal is to provide a turnkey service that automatically provides all the Layer 4 through 7 networking services that developers require to integrate both monolithic applications running on virtual machines as well as emerging microservices-based applications running on Kubernetes clusters.

“We're executing toward being the Cisco for L4 -L7,” he added.

Kong is muscling its Kuma service mesh platform into an increasingly complex ecosystem, vying for support against the likes of Istio, Linkerd, and Consul, which have the advantage of being battle-tested and production-ready now for a couple of years. 

Istio, until recently, was the favored front runner of the pack. It was established to provide developers with visibility into microservices without the need to change application code. 

Istio’s success has been bolstered by its link to the Envoy service proxy. Envoy was originally created by Lyft in 2015. It was developed as a service mesh substrate that provides common utilities such as service discovery, load balancing, rate limiting, circuit breaking, stats, logging, and tracing to heterogeneous application architectures. 

Unlike Istio, Linkerd uses its own proxy that is designed to be deployed as a service mesh. It was the first service mesh adopted as a hosted project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2017.

Palladino downplayed the milestone, noting that Kuma was the first Envoy-based service mesh donated to CNCF. 

“I think I like it this way: it's a vibrant ecosystem with lots of projects, and there are going to be winners and losers," he said. "We're in the early stage of understanding the best way to do things, and eventually, as the market gets more mature, we may expect some consolidation, some projects will disappear, some projects will be on the sidelines, and new projects will emerge.”